DMCA notices are sent in their millions every single week, mainly to restrict access to copyright-infringing content. These notices usually target the infringing content itself or links to the same, but there are other options too.

The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA allow companies that own or provide access to copyrighted works to target tools and systems that facilitate access to that content in an unauthorized manner. Recent examples can be found in the war currently being waged by the RIAA against various YouTube-ripping sites, which provide illicit access to copyright works, according to the industry group.

This week Facebook-owned Instagram entered the arena when it filed a DMCA notice against code repository Github. It targeted Instagram-API, an independent Instagram API created by a Spain-based developer known as ‘mgp25‘. Instagram claims that at least in part, the notice was filed to prevent unauthorized access to its users’ posts, which can contain copyrighted works.

“The Company maintains technological measures to control access to and protect Instagram users’ posts, which are copyrighted works. This notice relates to GitHub users offering, providing, and/or trafficking in technologies, products, and/or services primarily designed to circumvent the Company’s technological measures,” the complaint begins.

According to Instagram, Instagram-API is code that was designed to emulate the official Instagram mobile app, allowing users to send and receive data, including copyrighted content, through Instagram’s private API. It’s a description that is broadly confirmed by the tool’s creator.

“The API is more or less like a replica of the mobile app. Basically, the API mimics the requests Instagram does, so if you want to check someone’s profile, the mobile app uses a certain request, so through basic analysis we can emulate that request and be able to get the profile info too. The same happens with other functionalities,” mgp25 informs TorrentFreak.

While Instagram clearly views the tool as a problem, mgp25 says that it was originally created to solve one.

“Back in the day I wasn’t able to use Instagram on my phone, and I wanted something to upload photos and communicate with my friends. That’s why I made the API in the first place,” he explains.

There are no claims from Instagram that Instagram-API was developed using any of its copyrighted code. Indeed, the tool’s developer says that it was the product of reverse-engineering, something he believes should be protected in today’s online privacy minefield.

“I think reverse engineering should be exempt from the DMCA and should be legal. By reverse engineering we can verify whether apps are violating user privacy, stealing data, backdooring your device or doing even worse things,” he says.

“Without reverse engineering we wouldn’t know whether the software was a government spy tool. Reverse engineering should be a right every user should have, not only to provide interoperability functionalities but to assure their privacy rights are not being violated.”

While many would consider that to be a reasonable statement, Instagram isn’t happy with the broad abilities of Instagram-API. In addition to the above-mentioned features, it also enables access to “Instagram users’ copyrighted works in manners that exceed the scope of access and functionality that would be permitted by a user with a legitimate, authorized Instagram account,” the company adds.

After the filing of the complaint, it took a couple of days for Github to delete the project but it is now well and truly down. The same is true for more than 1,500 forks of Instagram-API that were all wiped out after their URLs were detailed in the same complaint.

Regardless of how mgp25 feels about the takedown, the matter will now come to a close. The developer says he has no idea how far Instagram and Facebook are prepared to go in order to neutralize his software so he won’t be filing a counter-notice to find out.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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Kim Dotcom’s under-development file-sharing/crypto project K.im had problems recently when its main K.im domain fell into third-party hands.

As previously reported, communication issues with the registry led to the domain expiring and it was quickly snapped up by Kalin Karakehayov, an expired domain specialist.

Dotcom informed TF that the project’s lawyers filed a complaint with the domain registrar in the hope that the domain would be returned. Indeed, following a review process completed around two weeks ago, the .IM registry determined that since the registration by Karakehayov had been abusive, the domain should be transferred back to the K.im project.

On the day the decision was handed down, Karakehayov told TF that he intended to appeal. However, just two weeks later it now appears that peace has broken out.

“After getting to know the people behind k.im, we have agreed to a small, cost-covering settlement to save mutual legal expenses and downtime of their project,” Karakehayov told us via email.

“They were very fair in its implementation that due to time constraints was based on pure trust from both sides. We’re on good terms and I wish all the best for their project.”

With the domain now apparently back in the hands of the K.im project, TorrentFreak caught up with Kim Dotcom who informs us that he didn’t personally speak to Karakehayov but the end result is welcome.

“We are happy to have the domain back,” he says. “We are aiming to release K.im this year and I’m confident that millions of users will love it. We are changing how commerce is done on the Internet for the benefit of all. You can expect some whining from the established monopolies.”

While Dotcom is pleased that this latest roadblock has been overcome, the New Zealand-based entrepreneur has bigger issues to deal with. Specifically, a Supreme Court judgment that will decide whether he and his former Megaupload colleagues will be extradited to the United States to face copyright infringement, racketeering, and money laundering charges – not to mention the possibility of decades in prison.

The Supreme Court hearing took place in June 2019 after several lower courts had determined that Dotcom, Mathias Ortmann, Bram van der Kolk, and Finn Batato can be sent to the United States to face justice. The defendants are hoping that the Supreme Court will decide to the contrary.

Dotcom informs TorrentFreak that he doesn’t have a date for the judgment but he’s nevertheless looking forward to “dissecting the judgment with the best legal minds.” That being said, he isn’t optimistic that the decision will go in his favor.

“I expect a 3:2 majority in favor of extradition because three of the five judges were appointed by the National Party and the former Attorney General who was responsible for the actions taken against me in New Zealand. This is a political case and it will most likely be a political judgment,” he says.

“The law in New Zealand couldn’t be more favorable for me so the judgment will probably be a hack of the law for the history books.”

While another adverse ruling would represent a significant setback for Dotcom, he maintains that the battle against extradition is far from over.

“The process doesn’t end with this judgment (unless I win) and Crown Law suggested at the start of the hearing that we could be fighting for another seven years until any finality is achieved,” he concludes.

If that timeline of events plays out, it will have been 15 years since the shuttering of Megaupload and the raid on Dotcom, his twins born in 2012 will be almost ready to leave school, and at least two US presidents will have come and gone.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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Late last year the RIAA started targeting several YouTube rippers and downloaders by sending relatively rare takedown requests to Google.

Instead of the usual DMCA copyright notices, the music group asked the search engine to remove various URLs for alleged violations of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.

The sites in question circumvent YouTube’s rolling cipher, which is a technical protection measure that protects audio and video from being copied without permission, the RIAA argued. As such, they should be removed from Google’s search results.

This takedown strategy appeared to be quite effective. After taking down the many links to FLVTO, 2Conv, Y2Mate, and Yout, the RIAA expanded its scope to other YouTube rippers. In total, the music group has now targeted thousands of URLs in hundreds of notices.

The upside for the RIAA is that there’s no standard counter-notice option for these requests. So, even when site owners don’t agree with the request, they have no option to protest it. Besides going to court, perhaps.

That doesn’t mean that these operators are sitting idly by while their search traffic is taken away. On the contrary, behind these scenes there’s a full-blown takedown war going on. Or to phrase it less aggressive: a game of takedown whack-a-mole.

Pretty much all of the large YouTube rippers are continuously updating to new URLs, which are not yet taken down by the RIAA. In most cases, new numbers are simply added to the URL. This ensures that their websites continue to show up in Google’s search results.

Take Flvto.biz, for example. People who access the site today will notice that the English homepage redirects to Flvto.biz/en44. However, just a few days ago it used Flvto.biz/en42, and in between, it was accessible through Flvto.biz/en43.

The site keeps updating its URLs to remain visible in Google’s search results. This is indeed needed, as the RIAA continues to send takedown notices similar to the one below.

Many other sites are using the same strategy, which is obvious from new homepages such as 2conv.com/en25, mpgun.com/lang-2en/convert, y2mate.com/en4, ytmp3.cc/en10, savefrom.net/3, and listenvid.com/us4.

The listenvid.com/us4 URL, which is still active at the time of writing, will likely update soon, as the RIAA removed it from Google’s search results just a few hours ago, as can be seen here;

The above clearly shows that many YouTube rippers are not backing down but the RIAA is showing no signs of stopping either. After it started a few months ago, the group’s efforts have only increased. Yesterday alone the RIAA submitted over a dozen notices targeting hundreds of URLs.

The result is a game of whack-a-mole that can potentially continue for years. Unless one side gives up of course.

None of the YouTube rippers we contacted responded to our request for comment. From what we can see, their traffic doesn’t appear to be impacted much. Some have seen a drop in traffic recently, but others witnessed an uptick at the same time. In any case, all the major sites are still findable in Google’s search results.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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In 2018, Justin Sun’s Rainberry Inc. successfully acquired BitTorrent Inc.

While the name Rainberry is rarely used in public, company brands such as BitTorrent, TRON, and TRX are more easily recognized by the public, with controversy rarely far behind.

Developments related to these various brands are usually followed closely by the cryptocurrency press, mainly due to Sun’s voluminous tweets that tend to focus on crypto matters, rather than the file-sharing activities of the uTorrent owner.

This was also the case yesterday when sites including Coindesk began reporting on an employment law dispute that was quietly filed last October by a pair of former Rainberry Inc. employees. However, this development also has an interesting copyright angle that hasn’t been explained in detail.

Richard Hall worked as a product manager at the company while Lukasz Juraszek was employed as an engineer, at least before they were dismissed. Their 70-page lawsuit is a trip through many serious allegations, including racism, threats, the witnessing of physical violence, and a number of closely related matters.

However, concerns over Rainberry’s exposure to copyright infringement issues appear to lie at the root of the legal action.

“Defendant Justin Sun and his hand-picked mainland Chinese-born subordinates were engaged in illegal piracy of copyrighted materials for defendant Rainberry Inc., in order to make a profit from the illegal piracy of those materials, as well as other illegal and unscrupulous activities,” the lawsuit reads.

Both Hall and Juraszek characterize themselves as “whistleblowers” who were subjected to a campaign of harassment after they raised concerns over activity at the company. The lawsuit claims that their employment at Rainberry was terminated following their “outright refusal to engage in criminal violation of state and national statutes concerning piracy of intellectual property”, including Hollywood first-run films.

Hall claims he was assigned by the company to work as Senior Director of Product Management on the emerging file-sharing product known publicly as BitTorrent File System (BTFS). He says he raised concerns with his superiors that depending on the architecture and implementation of caching and delivery algorithms, users of BTFS might be monetarily rewarded (via crypto tokens, such as BTT) for “unknowingly storing and distributing inappropriate content” and/or copyright-infringing material.

These complaints, Hall suggests, resulted in him being demoted in a manner that prevented him from overseeing the BTFS product. Nevertheless, he says he sought out proposals from two law firms specializing in copyright law to provide estimates for a legal review of what Rainberry and TRON were preparing to do, specifically for BTFS and another product called BTFS Movie or BT Movie (the lawsuit uses both).

However, the lawsuit claims that following discussion with Justin Sun, it was determined that no legal review would be carried out. According to Hall, he advised that the ‘Movie’ product should be renamed, so that outsiders wouldn’t be given the impression that the company was encouraging the illegal sharing of movies on the BTFS network.

Shortly after, his employment was terminated on the basis that he was “not a fit” for the company, Hall claims.

“[I]t become clear that Richard Hall was terminated because he raised legitimate legal concerns about the actual or potential for BTFS and associated BTFS Movie projects to be engaged in illegal activity and pirating of copyrighted materials that Justin Sun did not want to have investigated because it would delay the launch and reveal the illegal and nefarious activities in which the company was engaged,” the lawsuit reads.

In July 2019, Lukasz Juraszek reports that he realized that BTFS was no longer a “demo app”. As a result he began to step up his concerns over the application because the company had no control over the content being posted on BTFS “which at the time was entirely hosted on TRON’s infrastructure.”

According to him, the Movie app was then “handed off” to Rainberry’s “Mainland China” office for implementation “by end of July 2019.”

In August 2019, Juraszek says he again raised concerns that illegal content could be downloaded from BTFS, that he was uncomfortable working on the project, and that attorneys should be consulted before further work was done on BT Movie. He later carried out his own investigations by accessing the TRON “BT Movie” website to check if illegal content could be found.

According to him, he found a Chinese-subtitled version of The Lion King (which was still in cinemas) along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Hobbs & Shaw, Avengers: Infinity Wars”, and “many, many others.”

On August 20, 2019, following what appears to be several strained interactions with management on a variety of topics, Juraszek was reportedly dismissed for “sharing company information” with a third-party.

How the lawsuit will progress from here is unclear but the former Rainberry employees are demanding $15 million in damages. For his part, Justin Sun is mounting a vigorous defense, demanding that the complaint is dismissed in its entirety and the plaintiffs paying his costs.

The complaint can be found here with answers from Justin Sun and co-defendant Cong Li here and here (all pdf)

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This week we have three newcomers in our chart.

Terminator: Dark Fate is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

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